On Friday, September 19, 2014, Curt Prins (a mobile strategist) posted his thoughts, which were distributed by LinkedIn, on the comparative impact of the launch of the Android One, in India to Apple’s recent, highly publicized debut of the iPhone 6. Prins titled his post Apple just lost the global smartphone war to Google. This writer has written several posts to this blog to voice similar opinions about whether or not all of the media accolades about Apple’s new smart phones really amounts to much, at all. My concern is whether or not Apple will be able to maintain its enormous market capitalization just on the appetite of consumers at the very high end of the market, or not.

But Prins is to be commended for supporting his contention with metrics. I didn’t take the time to put together supporting data for my position, choosing, rather, to articulate it based on my gut instinct about markets and where all the frivolity surrounding the September 9, launch of the new iPhones might be headed.

A quick look at the Android One home page exposes some additional information worth noting: Samsung is noticeably absent from the set of OEMs committed to manufacturing the devices. The same set does include several businesses located in India, including Karbonn, and LavaOne to name just two.

The features of the device can be reviewed on the Android One web page. The quad core processor, all day battery life, and dual SIMs are more typical of smart phones targeted to the high end of the market than the low end. So the $105.00 price Prins claims for the Android One represents a significant move, on the part of Google and its Android OEMs, to lower the cost of entry for emerging markets (with India being the first) to the world of mobile online computing. Further, the actual consumer costs Prins presents, in contrast, for the iPhone 6, etc., lend accuracy to my own comments, earlier this week, on the actual street price for the iPhone 6, “after the emperor has shed his clothes (meaning the carrier subsidies applied to create an artificial consumer price of $199.00)”. Is yet another Apple smart phone, unlocked, worth $649.00? After the rush of the last two weeks, I don’t think so.

The Android One is also some bad news for Microsoft’s efforts to introduce low cost smart phones to the same markets. Ditto for Blackberry. But the real story, likely in the making, is precisely the change in leadership for the smart phone industry Prins alludes to in his post.